Historic Town of Mount Jackson

Mount Jackson, in its beginnings, was known as Mount Pleasant. The first inhabitants of the Mount Jackson area were the Shendo Indians, who were massacred by the Catawbas around the latter part of the seventeenth century.

In the early eighteenth century, land grants brought by the first permanent white settlers. On January 28, 1826, an act of the General Assembly of Virginia changed the name of the village in honor of General ("Old Hickory") Jackson.

During the 1862 Valley Campaign, General Thomas J. (Stonewall) Jackson established headquarters in the Rude House on Rude's Hill south of Mount Jackson and Camp Buchanan at Red Banks.